


whiskies neat

by Ellipsical



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, John barefoot in Sherlock's kitchen clad in nothing but Sherlock's white button-down, M/M, One Night Stand, Or Is It?, POV Second Person, Rimming, Sherlock Holmes falls in love, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-03-15 15:16:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 20,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13616085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellipsical/pseuds/Ellipsical
Summary: Home and hearth and whiskies neat, or, alternatively, Sherlock Holmes falls in love.This story is for72reasonswho bid on me in the Fandom Trumps Hate Auction 2018. 72, my dearest, you are a wonderful human and I've so enjoyed getting to know you a bit over the course of the last month. I want to make of this such a pillow soft place for you to land. I hope by the end I've achieved that for you.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [72reasons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/72reasons/gifts).



You’re thirty-three when you meet him for the first time.

It’s a perfectly ordinary Thursday in August. The tips of your gloved fingers are inked in iodine from the morning’s foray into Gram stains and there’s sweat trickling down your neck as you carefully pipette the solutions before you. The air outside your open kitchen windows is stagnate and syrupy thick and stained amber by the sun setting through the trees on the green out the back. You push the curls back from your forehead with the inside of your wrist and watch the dappled shadows dance across the fresh-cut grass and ache for a fag.

There’s nothing interesting on the police scanner and the experiment you just finished needs time to work, so you strip off the gloves and set off down Montague Street for a smoke in the slate blue shade of the British Museum.

Smoke wreaths your head as you wait at lights, breathing in the petrol, asphalt sear of a summer day in London. You wander a bit. Ordinary Thursdays are rife for people gawking and people gawk you do.

It’s soothing. Deductions calming the static fury of your mind at rest, the nicotine smoothing out the wrinkles in your thoughts, making them crisp, crystalline, stark.

Four cigarettes have carried you through Holborn and back into Bloomsbury just as the sun fully sets, the sky above you bleeding from marigold to lavender to indigo as you walk. The lamplights are just beginning to burn, molten against the black, as you duck into a pub to soothe the parched, smoke scorched scratch in your throat.

The beer is cool and honey gold and goes down easy. Froth bubbling on your lips, the glass deliciously chill against the heat of your palm. You smack your lips and lick the foam from beneath your nose, eyes strafing over the bar.

Perfectly ordinary Thursdays are for perfectly ordinary Thursday people and here they all are in their perfectly ordinary Thursday kit. The theatre crowd, the post-work crowd, the football lads dressed up for the day as investment bankers and barristers, boisterous and brash in the corner near the telly. Boring. Boring. Dull.

You take a long draught and don’t think about how you don’t fit in.

It’s almost normal now, isn’t it? How gazes skitter away from you when your eyes meet. How despite the fact that you wear the uniform, expensive black suit trousers and a tailored white button down cut from fine French linen, you are still a man apart. You will never be able to tuck into your fish and chips and mushy peas with the blokes at the end of the bar. You will never be able to chat up the two girls sipping martinis by the window. You will never be the type meeting a date for a drink before a show.

Not that you want to fit in.

No, you don’t want to fit into the mundanity of their ordinary Thursdays. You’d much rather lurk about the fraying edges of crime scenes and taste the cinder ash of chaos melting on your tongue. You’d much rather annoy that sergeant who calls you freak, all while her partner, the DI, a chain-smoker with a chronically cheating wife, takes you seriously and treats you to Chinese when you’ve helped solve a case. You’d much rather glean livers from the girl in the morgue who’s almost as strange as you and manipulate them to your heart’s content in the privacy of your kitchen. You’d much rather spend your days in the chem labs at the University of London, finishing your dissertation so that you can finally have the bloody degree in hand and your git brother will shut up about your potential. (You owe him that much as least, considering how much he paid for rehab)

You’re thirty-three and you’ve got track marks chicken-scratched into your left arm and you’re doing your level best to give this living sober lark a go and no one will look at you twice, but you don’t care, you don’t.

You drink your beer and you deduce their ordinary ill-kept secrets and it should make you feel better, but somehow it doesn’t make you feel any better at all.

You’re almost done, there’s two sips left and then you can have another two cigarettes on the walk home and that’s comfort enough to make the rest fade. You turn and lean against the smooth walnut bar and raise the glass to your lips and it takes all of two seconds for your whole life to change forever.

It’s a gut punch:

his eyes on your eyes.

Dark. Intent.

He’s dressed in a navy blue uniform, one of many RAMC officers standing in the far corner. A matching beret sits on top of his neatly trimmed blonde hair. He’s tanned a sweet tawny brown and he’s watching you. Blood pounds up to pinch your cheeks and tingle in the very tips of your ears.

He’s been watching you, you can tell the instant your eyes meet.

He’s been watching you and his gaze doesn’t skitter, doesn’t waver, doesn’t flee. He’s been watching you and the way his gaze rakes over you, like two hot, smouldering coals, he sees you and he _wants_ you.

Wants _you_.

Desire like the bite of a needle and the euphoria that unfurls through your veins after a hit, he’s all of these things and more. He's a calm placid pool with untold fathoms stretching beneath. He's commanding in a quiet way that makes you stand up straighter and take notice. He's reined in and on parade and yet you catch tantalising glimpses through the veneer he's painted. Glimpses of the heart of him. He’s soft jumpers the colour of marshmallow and biscuits with milk tea and that place called home you’ve never really known. 

Across the room, he’s drenched in candlelight. He burns against the soot black window, the colour of the spirits cupped in his hand; the deep topaz gold of a whiskey neat. He has the same effect: heady, intoxicating. You watch as he licks his lips, drawing his tongue, deliberately slow, across the coral pink seam, and a shiver cascades down your spine: rippling. You watch him, utterly bewitched, as he tilts his head ever so slightly towards the door.

Inviting.

You drain the last hop-sharp dregs of the beer and set it down with ten quid tucked beneath it.

He’s making his goodbyes as you do and your mind is racing, racing just as quickly as your heart, thinking:

_DoctorsoldiersurgeonCaptain_

“—goodbye, John!”

 _John_.


	2. Chapter 2

You tug open the door and suddenly he’s there beside you, holding it open so that you can step through, a hand slid low into the small of your back.

Heat spills through you, billowing out from where he’s touching you.

You step down onto the pavement and the tips of his fingers graze up your spine to settle in between your shoulder blades and for a moment he’s taller than you and he has to lean down to murmur in your ear, “I’m only in town for one night. Do you—“

“Mine,” you blurt out and you can feel your cheeks smart at your haste. “Mine’s just—“ and you point, ineffectually, northwards.

“Yeah.” Nodding. “Yes.” Smiling. “All right,” he says, with a laugh like a low, murmured secret, and his hand still hot on your skin through your shirt and you stare, stare at the oblique curl of his mouth and think, slowly, electrically, of kissing him.

You think of how he would taste, peat-moss and smoke, charcoal and heather. An ember of whiskey on your tongue.

Your eyes stutter up to meet his and he knows exactly what you were imagining.

He licks his lips again, like he’s thinking of it too, and your heart begins to pound against your ribs. He steps down beside you and turns to face the direction you pointed. You miss the feel of his hand on your body. “Do we need a cab?” he asks, as you take a moment to appreciate the cut of his figure in the clean lines of his uniform. The epaulets on his shoulders, the caduceus flashing on his beret, his boots gleaming, glossy jet in the puddle of lamplight on the pavement as he pivots to face you.

“For efficiencies sake, yes,” you say, raising your hand to flag one down.

You’ve done this before, but usually you’re drunk and usually you’re desperately trying to ignore whatever porn addled prattle your erstwhile bedmate keeps up as you stumble home in the early hours of the morning. Usually you’re not sober and still buzzing on a truly spectacular nicotine high and feeling like you could get on your knees for this man and still feel cherished. You feel transparent with need.

London is a smear of ink and neon past the glass as the cab pulls away from the kerb.

He watches you with that same intensity from the bar, sitting directly in front of you on the pull down seat.

Your legs brush as the cab sways into a turn and he reaches out and grips your knee to steady himself. He doesn’t remove it and you can feel your heartbeat settle there against his palm.

You exchange names and that feels like enough.

You don’t want him knowing too much because it might put him off. You, you who have been told over and over that you are odd and obtuse and cold and rude and strange. It’s best that he doesn’t find all of this out too soon, but it’s difficult, it’s terribly difficult to keep all the things you are learning from his cuffs to his shoelaces to yourself.

As you drive you pick at his ravelled threads.

You can feel something simmering beneath his calm facade. You sense it’s fury. He’s trying to control it, make it work for good. _Doctor_. But it’s seething inside him, like the core of a star, and he’s drawn to things that allow him to release it. _Soldier_. You want desperately to know what put that anger in him and how he manages to channel it. How he contains it. How he conceals it. How he can be two things at once, so steady, so deceptively ordinary, while the maelstrom rages inside him.

He fascinates you.

The ride passes in a blur of shifting shadows across John’s face.

_John_.

You like the way it feels in your mouth, the friction of your breath forming the single syllable. The way your lips form the slightest kiss when you say it.

The cab drops you in front of your flat.

Your hands are heavy with blood and they fumble the key in the lock. The stars wheel above you and the heavy summer air is velvet on your skin and he’s there beside you, vibrating with the same longing you feel trembling through you, and finally, finally you shove it home and you’re through.

Your chest feels lightning-struck, a column of white fire from your throat to your heart, burning.

You climb the steps, ablaze in the dark well of the staircase, with him at your back, making the hair at the nape of your neck prickle and spark.

It takes a short eternity to reach the third storey garret flat where you live tucked beneath the eaves.

This time the key goes in easy. You hold the door open and let him step inside.

You’re just bolting the lock and reaching for the light switch when he stops you. Fingers tangling with yours, he presses your hand to the wall. He’s standing so close you can feel the warmth of his body seeping through your clothes. You brace yourself against the door, the keys in your hand clattering brightly against the wood.

“I—“ but you’re not entirely sure what you wanted to say so you stop. Your knees buckle a little, bending to support yourself, your head falling forward as his left hand slides around your front to press itself to where your heart is thudding, thudding, thudding in the centre of your chest.

He steps forward, one polished boot slipping between your feet, and he settles against you, leaning into you, and you almost moan at the sensation. At the weight and the heat of him. The smell of him just teasing at your senses, cedar and musk and sweat. The moan catches in your throat and comes out strangled and quiet. A shocked, desperate, pleading sort of sound. A revealing sort of sound. Your heart in his hand. Beating a similarly traitorous tattoo. Your body betraying you at every angle. Offering your secrets up, one by one.

His palm, warm and sure, drags up, up, his fingers seeking the edge of your shirt, curling in, knuckles brushing against the fever of your skin.

He exhales shakily at the feel of you and his breath breaks against your spine: rushing.

You want to turn, you want to feel his breath on your mouth, to taste the whiskey on his tongue, but you hold yourself still, so still, as his thumb worries at the half-slipped button below the heave of your clavicles, and slowly, slowly, pushes it through.


	3. Chapter 3

You shudder, the breath shaking out of you.

He presses closer.

Behind you, your sitting room breathes against you both, hot and humid. Close and stuffy; you had shut the windows before you left for your walk. You want to throw them open, let the night air rush in, rush over you both. You want the cool river stone taste of the breeze on your tongue as you unbelt him, unwrap him, lay him bare. You want the cool stream flowing over you as you tumble him into bed, want to feel it raise goosebumps on his skin, want to bend and taste the salt of him as the sweat dries and crackles.

You want.

God.

You feel bruised with it, black throbbing purple, tender and aching with it.

You want. So badly.

His fingers work at the next button, your heartbeats pressed against each other, back to front, beating in sync. You can smell the leather of his belt and the wool of his uniform, the faint singe of his shoe polish, the starch of his dry cleaned shirt, the lingering scent of his aftershave, woodsy and green, and somewhere, beneath all that, the deep musk of his body. They mingle to form an impression that imprints itself on your mind. You hide it away for later.

“Sherlock.”

Your name in the dark and the quiet, in the shushed intimate whisper of his voice, it startles you. Your mind stutters to a halt.

He says, “Turn around,” when you don’t answer and then he’s gone, stepped away and back, his hand slipped away from yours, and you spin to catch him, to prevent him from walking away.

You clutch at his pocket, two fingers hooked in, and, snared, his hands come up to cup your elbows. Steadying.

“You’re shaking,” he says, and you realise you are. You’re trembling. “We don’t have to do any—“

“No.” You shake your head because he’s got the wrong end of the stick. “No, we _do_ have to—“

He huffs that low laugh again and he tucks his thumbs up into your rolled shirtsleeves and strokes over the smooth skin of your biceps and that’s not going to help you stop shaking at all is it? No, it’s not, but you don’t want him to stop, you don’t ever want him to stop touching you.

He murmurs, “There’s no rush. We’ve got all night.” He’s trying to soothe you, but it’s not working because now you’re facing each other and with every second that ticks past you’re swaying closer and closer together. It’s too slow, this gentle swaying, this tantalising, torturous almost closeness where you can smell the curling tendrils of whiskey on his breath but you can’t taste them yet. Patience isn’t your strong suite, so you decide to encourage things along. Your knees bend and you lean back against the door for leverage, wrapping your hands around his waist and pulling him snugly between your legs. He doesn’t resist, but he doesn’t give you what you want either. There’re still a few infuriating centimetres of air keeping you apart. Head dipping lower in offering, in supplication, you watch the passing headlights of a car from the street side window sparkle across the tips of his lashes. One of his hands comes up between you to rest against your bare breastbone and you can feel the burning heat of his palm sink down through skin and bone to flush against the thunder boom of your heart.

He slips another button through its hole.

Your shirt parts for him, just enough for him to slide his hands inside and fit themselves to the shape of your ribs.

He steps closer, the rough edges of his jacket, brushing against the tops of your thighs.

His warm breath teases over your skin, rifling the curls on your chest. Your nipples knot into two hard beads in anticipation.

You shiver.

He leans forward.

And runs the tip of his nose over the crest of your right pectoral, bottom lip just grazing the tip of your nipple.

“Oh, God,” you gasp, air sharp in your lungs, pricking raw in your throat. You close your eyes, let your head fall back against the door with a thunk as the wet flickering tip of his tongue darts out to feather over where you’re knit tight and aching for him.

The feeling crashes through you as he does it again, now pursing his lips to drag a wet kiss over you, now sweeping his tongue out to properly lick. Your cock, trapped in your trousers, begins to pulse and leak against your pants.

He nudges your shirt aside and noses down towards your armpit, scenting you.

“You smell incredible,” he growls, as you squirm at the tickle of his breath and the scrape of his stubble. His hands have slipped beneath your shirt and around to hold you by your shoulder blades and you arch shamelessly into him as he drags his open mouth up to suck your nipple back into his mouth.

You could come like this.

Up against the door and still fully clothed. Four buttons unbuttoned, shirt tails still tucked in, undone simply by the feel of his mouth on your skin. You haven’t even kissed properly yet and you can already feel the nascent ache in your thighs begin to build, radiating out through your navel in waves of heat.

You could let it happen. You could. Just with the friction of your cock rubbing against your pants and him flicking his tongue just like that

 _justlikethatohchristyeslikethatlikethat_.

You grip the back of his head and hold on for dear life.

But.

He brushes one last kiss across your tingling skin and then tips his head up and looks at you and you know, you idiot, how could you not, that he is in control, and he would never let it end like a dirty back alley fuck that’s over in all of two seconds. No, you can see by the look in his eyes that he has further plans for you and all of them will unfold at the same slow pace he began in the bar with a tilt of his head.

“I want you,” he says, soft and low and deep and honest, his fingertips stroking your waist and something inside you is knocked loose at those words. Some certainty that you held, at your core, that you are, by nature, unlovable, it shifts, and it feels like tectonic plates moving, an earthquake reforming the terrain of your heart. He doesn’t stop, he’s a force of nature razing your borders, breaking dams. “I want to make you mine tonight. I want to touch you the way you like. I want to take care of you. I want to make you feel good. So good. Will you let me?”

You stare at him, utterly poleaxed that he could want that from you.

 _You_.

His smile goes a bit crooked at your dumbfounded silence, but the earnest look in his eyes only deepens, when he says, “Sherlock Holmes, can I take you to bed?”

And nodding, speechless, an ocean where before there was only stone, you lean down to meet him.


	4. Chapter 4

His nose slips next to yours and the ragged scrape of your breath fills the sitting room as you wait for him to finally, finally close the space between you.

His left hand rises from your waist to gently cup your cheek.

His thumb dips down to trace the shape of your lips.

“I wanted to kiss you the moment I saw you,” he says, gravel rough, lashes lowered as he watches the _s—l—ow_ drag of his thumb. Your breath stutters in your chest and your mouth goes dry. Your lips part.

Your tongue, slick, wets him on his next pass.

He makes a small involuntary sound that shivers wildly through you. You do it again and you feel the fretted ribs of his fingerprint. You taste his skin.

“Can I.” He’s breathless, nuzzling you with his nose, nudging his mouth up, upwards towards you. “Can I kiss you?”

You breathe out, “Yes.”

At that first silken slide of his lips against yours you instinctively open to him.  
  
There is nothing tentative or furtive, there is no hiding from whatever this is burgeoning between you. You both give into it, helpless.

You bloom lushly against each other, white petals in the night, soaked in moonlight, heavy with nectar.

Warmth spreads out through you, flushing you with arousal. It unfurls up your spine, a vine of sunlight twisting through you, it’s all the colours of dawn: grapefruit, goldenrod, saffron, peach. You sink your teeth into it, tear it open, and the juices run over, tart and sweet. You worry his bottom lip, just the same, to collect the softest of moans from his throat, to feel the way he swells and throbs with blood, the way he pushes into you, bringing your bodies together at last.

You never knew a kiss could feel like this.

It has always been a means to an end. Sloppy. Messy. Moist. Unpleasant.

You have never taken your time like this. Never wanted to parse the flavours and textures of someone’s mouth before. Never wanted the kiss to never end, for it to go on indefinitely. You want to bottle this feeling, the plush feel of his tongue against yours, the faintest golden whisp of whiskey lingering like woodsmoke on a breeze, the rasp of his stubble, the strands of his hair slipping between your fingers. You hear, distantly, the sound of his beret hitting the floor.

His hands drop to your waist once more, and tug.

His fingers fumbling blindly between you. The last of your buttons undone.

He slides his hot palms up your chest to your collarbones and pushes your shirt off your shoulders.

He strokes his tongue into your mouth and you groan. He’s a master at this. At the tease and the plunge. He alternates between breaking apart, licking at you as you chase him back, pushing kisses to your swollen mouth to placate you, before he surges back inside, taking you deep and wet and filthy perfect.

Your heartbeat settles between your legs, hot in your belly, a steady liquid pulse.

His hands are warm and soft on your skin, his uniform, in contrast, is coarse and stiff, the fibres of the wool like sandpaper against your chest. You prickle all over.

He breaks from you and runs his mouth down the arc of your throat as you bare yourself to him, tilting your head back into his hand. His fingers thread themselves into your curls and lightly fist.

You gasp at the scrape of his teeth over your Adam’s apple. He soothes you with the sweep of his tongue.

You push your hips into him, desperate, and his other hand drops down to palm you through your trousers.

“Oh, God,” he breathes against the curve of your neck. “Oh, _Sherlock_.”

Your cock curves into his hand.

He rubs the heel of his palm up and down the length of you, fingers loosely cupping your shaft.

You’re certain you black out for two or three seconds.

“You’re so hard for me,” he says, voice low and awestruck.

It’s painful, almost, how much you want him to undo your belt and draw down your zip, how much you want to fill his hand and let the heat of him engulf your skin.

“Kiss me,” you say, because that is the next best thing.

He kisses back up your throat. Brushes his lips over the sharp edge of your jaw.

You tip your mouth down.

He opens beneath you and you slip your tongue inside.

He sucks, gently, on you and you moan, heartfelt and broken.

He does it harder and your blood pounds in your ears.

“Take me,” you pant, unable to wait any longer. You roll your forehead against his and beg, “Take me to bed. Please.”

“Wher-umph” He starts to ask, but you’re kissing him again aren’t you, so it bumbles against the roof of your mouth as you clutch him and turn him.

His hands tangle in your hair, his mouth hungry on yours as you push at his hips, elbows trapped in your half-removed shirt, manoeuvring him backwards, down the hall, towards your room. He allows himself to be handled.

Once you cross the threshold to your bedroom the quality of the air changes. You had left your bedroom windows open, genius you, and the air is cooler here and smells of grass and the flowers from Mrs. Haynes’s garden, two flats below.

You stand in the candied summer air and lick the honey of it off each other’s lips.

His fingernails lightly scratching at your scalp, sending tingling waves of sensation down your spine.

You kiss.

You could do it all night. If this was it, if this was all you could have. It would be enough.

You’re drunk on it.

The tenderness of it.

The urgency of it.

You’re dizzy with it.

It deepens, this thing, this ineluctable thing you’re sharing, there in the night. That vine of light snaking through you takes root in the dark and shatters it, glowing with a soft radiance between you.

You feel it, lambent, shining inside you.

“Tell me,” he whispers. “Tell me what you like.”

You blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, and while it’s honest, you know it’s not what he meant. “Mysteries.”

You're an utter, utter moron.

He snorts, nonplussed. “What. Like, puzzles?”

“Yes,” you say, embarrassed. Miserable. Blood hot in your cheeks.

You’re about to shrug it off, suggest something properly dirty to bring it back to the matter at hand, but he surprises you.

“All right.”

“All right?”

“Yeah. I’ll be your puzzle.”

“You. Will. Wait. What?”

You feel his nose slip against yours again. You feel his smile curl against your cheek.

“I’m your puzzle, Sherlock Holmes. Solve me.”

And, oh, exquisite man, it’s the most perfect answer you’ve ever heard.


	5. Chapter 5

But.

Oh.

Wait.

You love mysteries. You do. You adore them. They are what make life worth living surely.

But.

You don’t want to see his eyes dim as you rattle off the intimate details you have culled from his attire and his cowlicks and his accent and his fists and the pock marks on his cheek. (eldest sibling, Scottish ancestry, raised in Hampshire, quick temper, chicken pox age 3).

You don’t want to see him pull away. You don’t want his eyes to flick down and away and for him to rub the back of his neck and decide you’re not worth it.

But.

But.

There’s another puzzle here isn’t there?

A simpler one.

Oh!

Oh!

God, you really are a moron. The answer is right there and any ordinary person would have grasped it already. Stupid, stupid.

 _His body_.

His body is the puzzle.

No.

No.

You are unacceptably dim this evening.

His _pleasure_ is the puzzle.

An interesting one, a really cracking one, and look: your mouth is watering at the mere suggestion of all the data you could collect once he’s naked and under your hands.

 _This_ is the puzzle you should solve. Not the other, equally spectacular one that will make him bumble out an excuse and then leave.

Decision made, you curl your hands around his shoulders and bend to taste his mouth.

There in the green summer air, in the dark pool of night, you kiss him softly, and softly, and still softly again.

There is a place you go to—reverent, focused—when a problem is before you. You go there now. You let everything else fade away.

You pay attention to the moment when he tilts his head and surrenders.

You pay attention to the way his breathing quickens when you part, the way he sways forward, the pained furrow between his brows that only smooths when you lean down once more and press your mouth to his.

You pay attention to the way his hands slide underneath your open shirt to stroke your back.

He telegraphs to you his need like one of the crickets out on the green: thrumming, a body of song, of yearning, calling out to be met.

You meet him and he gives himself over quietly into your keeping. Lets you explore him. You map him: the tendons pulled taut in his throat, his madly tripping pulse, the brushed velvet of his ear, the bead of sweat at his temple, the blades of his stubble, silvered in the moonlight, and the way they buzz against your lips.

He wants it soft, you realise slowly.

Tomorrow he goes to war.

The thought makes your chest constrict.

He has tonight.

Just tonight.

He wants it soft and he wants it slow and he wants it sweet, and he chose you, and you, you are only too willing to give it to him.

His jacket belt chimes as you undo it. The leather snakes, hard and glossy, through your hands as you draw it out and off. You set it down on the chair beside your wardrobe, reaching blindly, unwilling to part from him long enough to look down and guide it’s descent. It glances off the seat and hits the floor with a dull thunk. Neither of you pay it any mind.

The brass of his coat button is cool and etched beneath your fingertips as you fidget it through it’s hole.

“You’re so quiet,” he murmurs when you tuck your nose into his neck and breathe in the scent of his aftershave. Woodsy and warm, it flushes through you, amber in your chest. “Am I dreaming you?”

His voice is low and slightly slurred. His eyes are closed when you pull back to look down at him.

There in the wan light of the moon you see him more clearly than you have all evening.

Deductions fire at a rapid pace. You can almost see him atomizing in front of you. Your fingers fly over the rest of his buttons. Gently you move behind him to take his coat from him. The silk lining is hot from his body and it seeps into your fingertips as you slide it down his arms. You hang it in your wardrobe.

When you turn around he is sitting on the edge of your bed in a white vest, bent at the waist, untying his boots.

You step over and turn on your bedside lamp. You both blink dumbly for a moment as your eyes adjust.

You kneel.

You know all too well what it’s like to walk with death as a companion. You know the shadow it casts and you can read his apprehension, his fear, his resignation in the way he’s coming apart in front of you. The tense line of his shoulders, his fingers trembling on the laces, the way he’s giving himself to you, as if you might be able to keep him together for one more night.

You dip your head and catch his downturned mouth. You kiss the hard corners, brush over the thin line, again and again. He breathes and breathes and breathes into you. You kiss him until he softens again, until his lips part and you can push your tongue inside. You touch the bare skin on the inside of his forearms, run your hands up, up, to touch the tender dimples of his elbows and the furred backs of his arms. He abandons his shoes and sinks his hands into your hair again. You shuffle forward on your knees until you’re pressed close between his spread thighs.

Heat blooms between you, sweat springing up, slicking his skin. There is salt on your tongue as you drag it down his throat, and the blood-sharp metallic scent of your bodies rises around you.

You tuck your fingers underneath the hem of his vest and tug.

For a moment you’re separated, but once the shirt is pulled over his head and tossed into the far corner of your bedroom you return to his neck, to the ridge of his collarbone, to the bitter-tart hollow of his throat.

He’s golden, forged in the light from your lamp, lucent, burnished. You reach out to touch the burning edges of him.

You palm his ribs, rub your thumbs over his nipples, the hair on his chest springing up around them, wiry and wet. You run the tip of your tongue over the gleaming coils and taste the soap tinged musk. He moans and arches and shivers, pushing into your hands, his breath coming in short hot little bursts above you. His hips shift on the bed, restless, and you pin him with your hands.

He sits back, bracing himself on his palms as you move lower, nuzzling your way down his stomach, pressing wet open mouth kisses to his caramel, toffee gold skin as you go.

You gather the disparate parts of him in your hands and shape him, give him form with your touch. You ground him there with you.

When you do finally speak, your voice is roughed up, scratchy and hoarse, “You’re not dreaming. I just. I need more data, can I—”

Your hands rest, quiescent, on his belt.

He licks his lips. His eyes, you can see for the first time, are a deep, twilight blue. He nods. “Yeah.” The corner of his mouth curling up. “Wouldn’t dare stand in the way of the investigation.”

Surprised, pleased, you snort, and his smile widens until you can see his the white edge of his teeth. You like the way it crinkles the edges of his eyes.

You move back a little and he shifts his legs, toeing off his boots. You run your hands down the backs of his calves and roll his socks off. His feet flex, white against the floorboards, his toes curling instinctively at the cold shock of the wood. You touch the cool silk of his ankles. He undoes his belt, pops the button on his trousers. Slowly, his eyes locked on yours, he draws down his zip.

Together you get them off until he’s sitting before you, legs splayed wide, hair mussed, cheeks pink, his mouth stained red from your kisses, eyes blue-black, in only his pale blue boxer shorts.

You can see, clearly, the long, thick line of his cock, hard and curving up, tenting the fabric, the round head teasing at the waistband of his shorts, nudging the elastic, trying to push free.

You can smell him.

The warm, still air presses in close around you, trapping his scent, sets it pricking in the back of your nose.

Your mouth, it floods. You swallow, thick, and it resounds in the quiet.   

Your hands find his waist.

You hear, above you, his shaky inhalation.

In the silence of his held breath, heart pounding in your ears, you lean down.


	6. Chapter 6

The short crinkly hairs on the inside of his thigh snap against the tip of your nose as you drag it up. Sweat thick and brackish smeared on your tongue. The scent of his body, strong and clean as black tea, as you breathe him in.

His hand falls, soft and open, onto the back of your head. He makes a small, helpless sound.

His legs bracket your head and you can feel the tremors running beneath his skin.

His other hand closes gently around your left arm.

You feel the tension grip him a moment before he gasps,

“ _Wait_.”

You pull back and look down at it.

At his thumb pressed to the latticework of raised white lines in the crook of your elbow.

Heat washes down your body as you look up at him. Blue eyes flick to yours, a question in them.

Mouth dry, tongue ungainly, you answer, thickly, “I’m clean.”

John shakes his head like that’s not what he meant and his brows bunch, his gaze falling back to where he’s stroking your scars.

“I wouldn’t have brought you back here if I wasn’t.”

After a minute he clears his throat, brows still complicated and tucked down and in and you can’t read that look at all. He says, evading, voice rough, “I’m clean too.”

“I was tested three months ago,” you say, carefully. “I haven’t been with anyone since.”

“Test results from my CO are in the pocket of my jacket,” he says, just as circumspect.

Your skin crawls with the stilted awkwardness of it and it’s hateful, so you lean up and kiss him and tell him to lie down.

He scoots up the bed to lie back against your pillows, one arm tucked behind his head, watching with amused interest as you wriggle out of your shirt and trousers.

You toss them onto the chair behind you and climb up onto your bed and he spreads his legs to let you crawl between them. Him below you, honey on the charcoal of your sheets, he reaches up to cup your elbows. Hair tousled, a rosy flush on his chest and throat, you set your hands to the hard jut of his hips and dip your thumbs into the vee, stroking the skin just above the waistband of his pants.

“You like to kiss,” you say, starting with the obvious. John’s mouth slants up in a half smile that makes something warm unfurl in your chest that you recognise as affection.

“I like it when you kiss me, yes,” he says, and runs his hands up the backs of your arms to your shoulders. He tugs. “I’d like you to kiss me right now, in fact.”

“In a minute,” you say, resisting, unable to stop the pleased smile from curving your mouth or the blush from pinking your cheeks. He grins at you and with a fault line cracking through you, you feel _it_ for the first time.

But no, no, that’s ridiculous. You’ve only known this man for an hour at best. It’s not only ridiculous, it’s impossible.

You push the feeling down and don’t acknowledge it. Sure that if you don’t name it, it will go away.

Slightly rattled, you refocus, looking down at the languid sprawl of his body, relaxed and loose. You slip your thumbs below his waistband and feel the imprints of the elastic on his skin. His lashes lower to watch where you’re touching him and he draws his bottom lip between his teeth, knees falling wider.

“The only scientific way to determine where else you like to be kissed would require me to do an intensive study. In order to exhaust all possibilities I would need you to let me kiss every inch of you.”

His eyes are very, very blue when he looks back up at you. “Well,” he says slowly, voice low and husky, “in deference to science and all…”

The timbre of his voice and the rasp of need scratching at the edges sends a shiver skating down your spine.

“This next request might seem presumptuous, but please hear me out.” This part is dreadfully unsexy. John nods, watching you squirm. “I’d like you to feel comfortable for this next stage and I believe, based on what I’ve observed in the past, that partners were less self conscious if they had showered prior to beginning.”

“You do this a lot then?” he asks, forehead wrinkled. “Bring blokes home and do exhaustive studies on them?”

You shake your head, frustrated. “No. _God_. Never.” Your nose scrunches in distaste at the thought. “I have never done _this_ with anyone else before. I merely observed that if a partner was allowed to shower before commencing acts of a sexual nature they were less reticent.”

John blinks at you, wide eyed, and you get that familiar sinking feeling in your chest.

You are not an ordinary Thursday person after all. It was only a matter of time before John realised it.

You take your hands back. “I’ve ruined it, haven’t I?”

“What? No! I—“

“It’s all right.” You gesture towards the door. “I’ll let you get dressed.” You make to leave, swinging your legs off the edge of the bed, but he catches your wrist.

“Sherlock, you’ve got it wrong.”

“I really don’t think I have.”

“Will you just hang on a moment and let me explain?”

“Go on then.”

“Look at me, hm?”

You shift, turning slightly towards him so that you can look down at where he’s curled on his side, knees resting against your back, propped up on his elbow.

“I don’t do this either,” he admits. “I don’t know what it was about you, but…” he trails off, pausing to lick his lips. You nod. You know what he means.

“I don’t want to leave.”

You don’t want him to either.

“I will if you want me to.”

You shake your head.

“Good. Now, about your proposition. I just don’t want you to think I came here with any intention. I don’t want you to think I have expectations. Do you know what I mean?”

“It is quite obvious what this is,” you interject.

“What is it?” he asks softly, like he genuinely doesn’t know.

“It’s. It’s—“ you start to say: a one night stand, but it would be a lie wouldn’t it? It is, quite frankly, the most inaccurate word for whatever it is happening between you that you could choose. It is, however, the only one that will do. You have only the one night. You stop in an agitated stutter and he smiles kindly up at you.

“I’ll take that shower then.”

“Do you want me to—“

“No. Best if I do it myself. For efficiencies sake and all,” he teases, quoting you back to you and ~~Christ, you want to keep him with you always~~. (Ridiculous, redact, redact)

“I’m sorry I’ve made it awkward.”

“Not awkward. Just honest. Honest I can appreciate. Now, where’s your loo?”

You point towards your bedroom door. “First door on the right. The taps are a bit wonky. You need to jiggle the cold up and down a few times before the hot water will run.”

He pushes up to kneeling. The mattress dips as he settles beside you and it cants you toward him. You fall slowly towards him, your shoulder coming to rest against the warm expanse of his chest. Fingers lightly brushing along your jaw, he leans in to press a kiss to your mouth.

You’re not sure how long he lingers there, but you’re thoroughly wrecked by the time he pulls away. You keep your eyes closed, your lips still tingling, your breath hitching shallow and quick, your heart racing, and listen to his quiet footsteps down the hall and the muted click of the door in it's jamb and the groan of the pipes through the walls.


	7. Chapter 7

You’re standing at the kitchen sink eating a plum when you hear the water turn off.

The bathroom door opens behind you a few minutes later and a fluorescent slash of light appears on the wall in front of you.

You set the pit down into the basin and are sucking the juice from your fingers as you turn.

He’s backlit, a figure cut from shadow, as he stops and lets his gaze roam around the room. Your microscope and bunson burner at the table beneath the window, your sofa and your desk littered with tea cups and toast rinds and haphazard stacks of newspaper, your violin case open beneath it’s stand in the corner, the pixelated pictures of nefarious criminals printed in black and white pinned to your walls, the random detritus that litters the floor around your coffee table where an ashtray sits overflowing beside a masticated apple core upon which the shape of your teeth are scored, like perfect fossilised remnants. For a moment you see it all through his eyes and you watch him carefully for signs of disgust.

“So you’re actually a proper scientist then?” he asks, and you can hear the smile in his voice even if you can’t see it. You relax, leaning back against the counter.

“Indeed. I read chemistry just down the road.”

“Ah,” he says, as if this makes perfect sense. And then, teasing, fond, “You’re one of the mad ones aren’t you?”

You can’t deny it, so you don’t.

He pads across the worn lino patterned with faded roses, trailing the soap tinged steam from the bathroom behind him. He’s emanating heat; you can feel the humid burn of it singe your skin as he stops just in front of you.

There’s a towel wrapped around his waist and his hair is standing on end and before you know it he’s tipping up onto his toes to kiss you.

His mouth is soft and melts against yours and tastes of mint; he’s used your mouthwash. It clashes with the sweetness of the plum on your tongue.

You both make a face when you pull away.

“Oi, that’s terrible,” he says, smacking his lips.

“It’s awful,” you agree, nodding, leaning down.

He giggles into your kiss and oh, that’s delightful, that’s utterly perfect. How can you make him do that again?

He leans up and into you, smiles bumping, and you gather the warm, damp shape of him into your arms.

The curtains at the window rustle as a breeze floats in and he shivers at it’s cool touch, his arms prickling with goosebumps.

The knot of his towel digs uncomfortably into your stomach and his toes are cold where they’re touching yours. Your mouth is starting to go numb and taste of mint too and his hair is wet and tacky in the cup of your palm and the combined heat of his body and the trapped sunlight of an attic flat in August are making you sticky with sweat and you don’t care a wit. You don’t want this night to ever, ever end.

You kiss, mouths open, tongues stroking. It is deep and languorous and you can’t help the desperate sounds you make or the needy way you palm his back and draw him closer.

The terrycloth is rubbing against your thighs and sending stacticky shocks sizzling through you. Your cock is trapped in your pants against his stomach and it’s maddening to think of the thin barriers keeping you apart.

“Bed,” you manage to say in between.

He nods, but surges back up to kiss you, wrapping his hands around your neck, fingers threading into the curls at the nape of your neck.

“God, you gorgeous thing. I want to _do_ things to you,” he murmurs into your ear as you push off the counter and you stumble a few steps forward.

The towel unknots and slithers off his hips and suddenly your hands are full of bare skin and you gasp into his mouth as you push your hands down from the small of his back and over the swell of his arse.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says, pushing his hips into you and you feel the hot silky drag of his cock against your thigh.

You don’t even have time to appreciate it because you have to throw out a hand to guide you through your doorway and then you’re both falling down onto the bed and he squirms electrically below you.

“Sherlock,” slurred, like he’s drunk on you. Like you're the whiskey in his bloodstream, making him high. You can’t stop running your hands down his back, over his arse, and down the backs of his thighs. He fizzes like a peach beneath your touch, dusted in fine golden hairs all over and flushed from his nape to his throat.

“You promised,” he says, breathless and clutching at the back of your head as you lick into his mouth. He says it, but you’re not paying him any mind. You can’t when you have so much else to focus on. Like shoving your thigh between his legs and letting him rock against you with a long, low moan. He grinds down and you can feel the bloodhot skin of the entrance to his body, can feel the soft weight of his bollocks and the short crinkly hairs around the base of his cock.

“Sherlock, wait, wait, you promised,” he mumbles against your lips.

“Promised what?” You pull back, dazed, and blink down at him.

“You said.” Sodding hell look at him. Just look at him. How are you supposed to focus on anything when he is in your bed looking like that? You drag your eyes away from the defined muscles of his stomach and the hard red beads of his nipples and you meet the deep sea cobalt of his eyes. It’s not any easier. He’s smiling at you crookedly and he’s blushed to a lovely crimson across his cheeks, but you listen, you do, when he says, “You said you’d kiss every inch of me. You said you’d solve my puzzle.”

Bleeding Christ, you did. Cursing the you of only a half an hour ago, that romantic nitwit, you drag your hands up from where they’ve been fondling the seam of his arse and rest them chastely on his shoulders.

You lean down and rest your forehead against his, nuzzling the side of his nose.

“I want you to,” breathed out against your cheek. Whispered, secret. “I want you to kiss me everywhere. I want you to leave the shape of your mouth all over me. I want to carry it with me when I go tomorrow.”

There is an ache inside you that beats in time with each heavy thud of your heart. It hurts so badly, for a moment you cannot speak.

“Sherlock?” He sounds concerned.

“I want that too,” you say, when you can, tucking your face into his neck and wrapping your arm around his waist, fitting him close, as close as he can get against you. “I want you to take me with you. However you can.”

“Then kiss me,” he says, soft. “Kiss me everywhere. Kiss me, Sherlock. Please. Kiss me now.”


	8. Chapter 8

When you pull away there is salt on your lips and his cheeks are slightly damp.

His eyes are screwed shut tight; a single tear drop squeezed out at one corner perches for a moment before it tracks down into his hair.

You turn him on his back. When he starts to say, fists rubbing vigorously at his face, his voice garbled and thick, “I’m sorry—“ you shush him soundly.

You settle him back against the pillows and strip off your pants.

You kneel on the bed between his legs, bare. The breeze has gone and the still air rests on your skin, warm and heavy. There is sweat gathering in the seam of your spine and the crack of your arse, it slicks the hair between your thighs. The smell of you both scents the air, metallic and sharp.

You touch the arcs of his ribs, run your hands down his sides to the soft plane of his belly, over the flesh of his hips, to gently grip his thighs. He gazes up at you, open, expectant, whatever emotion had overcome him before, sadness, fear, has been pushed back, reined in. His eyes are black in the low light, his skin buttery and soft in the lamplight, hair tousled, his ash-blonde fringe swept off his brow and finger-raked to the side. He’s deceptively small, lying there in the middle of your queen sized bed. His presence is larger than the space he takes up physically. He’s powerful and solid and hardened by army training. Lightly muscled, he’s toned from regular exercise, the edge of his jaw sharp from discipline and exhaustion. His eyes are lined at the edges with worry and laughter both and there are bags beneath that speak of sleepless nights. He’s soft at his middle with muscle that bunches beneath when your thumbs stroke him there. He’s got a lovely big cock. Bigger than he should have, but you’re growing used to the way he contradicts himself. He’s unselfconscious in that way doctors are, used to bodies and their irregularities. His hands rest, one on his chest, one on the bed at his side, and he doesn’t fidget beneath your scrutiny as you think you might if the tables were turned. He’s smiling up at you, that half smile you’re coming to know means he’s pleased, or maybe, surprised. It lights his eyes from behind, softens the darkness of them. You’ll build a cathedral out of him later, in some secret corner of your mind palace, a place you can kneel in, just as you are now, and worship.

“I think I am dreaming,” he says, voice pitched low, his eyes moving softly over your face. “I think I’m going to wake up tomorrow and this will all have been in my mind.”

You pick up his hand from where it rests on the rise and fall of his breath, still warm from the beaten percussion of his heart, and lift it to your lips.

You brush the tips lightly, kiss each grooved pad. You nuzzle down into the cup of his palm and rub your open mouth over the heel of his hand. The veins in his wrist stand out against your tongue and taste of your soap. They fork and twist and run blue beneath his skin. You follow their path to the inside of his elbow and suck. He draws his breath in through his teeth in a hiss and his hips twitch up, searching for contact. The wet head of his cock catches against your hip and leaves a sticky impression behind. You settle there, sucking on the soft, thin skin until you can taste only him, until you can feel the bruise begin to form, hot against your tongue. When you pull away there is small red mark. You stroke it with your thumb, admiring it. In school that was the place you practiced French kissing on yourself. You remember how it felt to press your thumb to the hickey you’d made, to feel the ache splinter through you. You think of him, on the airplane tomorrow, with his arms folded, the dull throbbing every time he moves. You’re there with him, he’s carrying you with him, he’ll think of you each time and he’ll know it wasn’t a dream.

You bend and set your mouth there again, sucking at the tender brand, and he moans and fists his hand into the sheets. Your name an exultation on his tongue.

Only when you’re satisfied that the imprint will last the week do you move on. Up the tensed bulge of his bicep, pushing his arm up as you go until you can bury your nose in the coarse hair that grows underneath. You flatten your tongue against it and swipe up, licking the sweat and the animal tang of his body into your mouth. It makes him gasp and tremble wildly. You do it again, scraping your teeth through the wiry thicket to coax another deep, broken sound from him, before you relent, and suck sloppy wet kisses down his side. He giggles and tries to push you away, his knees dug into your sides. You cannot resist his laughing mouth and you take a brief interlude to kiss him, sharing the musky-dark taste of his body between you.

His eyes are thick with pupil when you pull away, dreamy and unfocused. You brush his brow with your mouth. Run it over his eyelids. His lashes. His temples. His cheeks. You take away all evidence of his tears.

You kiss the rough sides of his nose. Down the ridge to the tip and then up to the furrows between his eyes. Above his head you wind your fingers up with his.

You run your tongue over his lips. They part, red and wet, and you trace the top lip first. Then the bottom. He lies below you, breathing shallowly. His legs are spread wide around you, your knees tucked up against his arse. He wraps them around your hips and sets his heels into the small of your back pressing you down to lie against him fully. It makes your cocks align, the urgent satin skin gliding together and both of you shudder at the sensation. You thrust, helpless, pushing your hips together, bearing your weight down into him. His hand tightens around yours and he cries out into your mouth, breathless.

You tear your hips away, panting. You press both his hands above his head, pinning him. Curls falling down around your face you kiss him. You push your tongue into his mouth and his feet slip down, into the crooks of your knees. You press his hands down into the pillows, spread your knees on the mattress, and take away his leverage. He’s at your mercy and you can tell by the way he shivers and groans deep in the back of his throat that he loves it. You kiss him and kiss him, until he’s boneless, warm and pliant and utterly lax beneath you. You kiss him until your lips begin to ache.

You continue your journey. His ears are not especially sensitive like yours are. Nor is his chest. Though he loves your mouth on his throat and writhes beneath you when you lick down it. You leave another mark at the base, just where it meets his shoulder, where it will be hidden beneath his shirts, but visible to him when he undresses. Another one, a smaller one you nibble into his pulse. His stomach is too sensitive; ticklish to light touch. He winces and stiffens and his hands tighten instinctively around yours to keep from bucking you off. One kiss, to his belly button, is all you leave.

He’s blushed pink by the time you untangle your hands from his and sit up. The marks you’ve left burn darker against the rose-gold of his sex-flushed skin. The image sears itself into your mind.

“Budge up,” you say, helping him arrange the pillows so that he is propped up, half-sitting, giving you more room to work.

His cock is standing stiff and dark with blood against his stomach. You study it.

“Jesus,” he says, voice warm with laughter and rough with desire at once. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever come before just having a bloke look at his cock, but if you keep doing that I’m willing to bet that I could.”

You like the challenge of this a little too much and he must be able to see it in your face because he nearly doubles over in delight.

“If you’re quite finished then?” you say, prim, affecting annoyed with your one eyebrow arched, but you’re smiling so there’s no sting. The smile John gives you is so genuinely fond, so genuinely _affectionate_ , you nearly burst from the feeling that floods through you. You’re not entirely sure anyone has ever looked at you that way before. Your chest is washed in warmth and it’s  _that_ feeling again and frantically you push it down and away.

“Christ, you’re lovely, you know that?” You shake your head and scoff, because _that_ is certainly not something you’ve been described as before, but he won’t let it go. He reaches for you, wrapping his hands around your arms and tugs you closer. The soles of his feet mold themselves to the outside of your calves as you brace yourself against the headboard with your hands. “Most people would have turned me out by now. A stranger crying in your bed isn’t exactly what someone signs up for when they bring someone home for the evening…” he trails off, licking his lips. His eyes are very, very blue this close up.

“But you’re different, aren’t you? You’re quite extraordinary, I think. So, er, thank you, I guess. Yeah. Thank you for not…for…well…”

He’s turning red again, stammering and clearly uncomfortable, and it’s unbearable, so you kiss him to shut him up.

He’s grinning up at you when you’re finished and you can’t help it, you grin back, an ocean of feeling rising in your chest at an alarming rate. You dam it up as best you can, considering the faulty human heart that you’re working with.

“I think I’d quite like to continue. Are you amenable?” you murmur, and he shivers, deliciously effected by the rough timbre of your voice.

“By all means,” he whispers back, arching up for one last lingering kiss that makes all your joints turn to jelly with its unexpected sweetness. Once he releases you and you’ve gathered your wits about you once more, you turn your attention back to where it’s most wanted.

His poor, very neglected cock.


	9. Chapter 9

The very tops of his thighs are taut and covered in fine, downy blonde hairs that slip silky soft beneath your palms. It makes you think of magnolia buds, furred and turgid, in your French grandmother’s springtime garden.

How you used to stroke them with your thumbs, all that life beneath the silky green shell, bulging toward blossom.

He’s tense beneath your hands, strung with longing. Alive with it.

His heels shift against the mattress, restive. His eyes are liquid, blue blistered black, gleaming.

You think of that last single tear. The way the quivering pearl of it cut down and into his hair.

It’s not your area.

Emotion.

Not unless it suits the purpose of some crime. Those hard and tangled roots beneath the surface of murder and mayhem that need to be unearthed to provide motive.

He’s here for some sad reason then. And about to go back to the desert (which desert?) and face ghosts and the grotesque, ghoulish theatre of war.

What would have brought him home? _Doctorsoldiersurgeoncaptainoh_

Funeral, most likely.

No.

Funeral _s_.

Your hands gentle in response to this realisation, move slower, softer, over his fraught and clamouring skin.

“ _Sherlock_.” It’s almost a sob.

You tip forward and nose at his hip.

You open your mouth over it, let your breath run out against him.

His legs fall wider and his breathing goes ragged, rasping loudly in the quiet room. His hand slips itself into your hair.

You brand him; that silky hollow of his iliac crest marbled periwinkle with veins. Draw his thin skin up into your mouth and leave him purple and pounding. Oh, listen to the way he whines. The way he gasps and gasps. Look at the way his heart strikes against your tongue and the way his hand buries itself wrist deep into your curls.

You follow the valley of his bone structure down, down. Into the flaxen field of his curls where you lap at his salt and musk. Where you can nuzzle at his tight sac, roll the balls across the bridge of your nose, and then dip lower, where the hot coppery scent of him makes your mouth water and the back of your nose sting. Where you can push your tongue flat and rub it over his perineum to feel his thighs press in close to your ears, to feel the way he surges down onto your mouth. From this vantage you can look up the gilded expanse of his body, head thrown back, throat arched, undone.

He’s so beautifully _responsive_. You want to keep him here for days and wring every secret from him. A lifetime still wouldn’t be enough you don’t think, to solve his puzzle. ~~You find you’re willing to try~~.

You scrape your mouth over the inside of his thighs trying to cover the way the thought shocks you. (Redact, redact, redact) You let the stubble on your cheeks lash him, make him moan and prickle up in goosebumps. You press wet kisses to the hollows of his knees before you pin them down to the bed so that he’s splayed and utterly open to you.

“Oh, _God_ ,” he exhales shakily, crooking one arm over his eyes to hide from, what must be, the purely ravenous way you are devouring him with your gaze. His breath quickens, tripping, skipping; his cheeks are stained to scarlet beneath his elbow.

“You have a marvellous cock,” you purr. Predictably, his breath catches, held. Less predictably, his cock twitches and a single milky bead falls, to land trembling on his belly. You lean down to taste it and it spreads over the tip of your tongue, bitter-bright. 

You let go of his knees to brace one hand beside his hip. With the other you take up the base of his cock, circling it lightly.

It rises up from your loose fist, heavy and flushed a deep, brooding rose. There’s a prominent vein that runs up the dorsal side and the thick, plummy crown has pushed it’s way out of the foreskin; greedy. You thumb it back so that it’s fully retracted, plump and velvety with a vivid red slit down the middle. 

You look up at him, through your lashes. Mouth hovering over the tip, arse in the air, back bowed, you present a picture. He watches you from beneath his arm, you can see the flicker of his lashes, the sheen of his eyes. You watch as he sinks his teeth into his lip, bites it until it’s swollen and wet and red. His knees fall out to the side. His hand slips down, out of your hair, brushing your cheek, your jaw. His thumb traces your bottom lip, attention rapt. You open and let the tip touch your tongue. He presses in, curling. You close and suck it deeper, letting your eyes flutter shut. He tastes of soap and skin.

Outside, the wind rustles the trees out on the green and the curtains stir at the sill. The cool air slips over your feet, makes your toes curl. You hear muffled sounds, of laughter, of a dog barking, faintly of music somewhere far off.

You wonder if anyone can hear him when he moans.

If anyone can hear how much he likes it when you lick a long, slow line from root to tip, tracing that spindly ridge, inked in blue blood.

Can they hear how he likes it when you flick the tip of your tongue against the vee of his frenulum. Over and over?

Or when you drag your tongue around and around the top, dipping beneath the tart edge of his foreskin?

They surely must be able to hear the sound of your heart as you take him inside you for the first time.

The way it hammers away at your chest as you sink down on him, the round head nudging along the top of your palate, the seawater taste of him leaking all over the inside of your cheeks. Your lungs burn as your lips meet the top of your fist, the backs of your eyes smarting with tears when you pull up and off.

You stroke him, feel him flex against your palm: thick, spit slicking the way, foreskin gliding around the core of him. The bed sheets rouche into rumpled bunches in his fists and he’s making sounds drawn up from deep in his chest, rumbling.

You pout your lips, kiss the head, kiss down the shaft, your hand following the curve of the underside, knuckles brushing against the coarse coiled hair on his belly. His skin shivers and leaps beneath your touch. A string of curse words stumble out as you lick at his slit and gather the bitter beads of him, let them melt on your tongue. Eventually he’s reduced to just one:

“Oh, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

He can’t stop watching you. Can’t help himself. He likes the way you look with his cock in your mouth. He likes the way you work your fist around him. He likes it when you drizzle him in your saliva, likes the hard edge of your teeth on the flared skirt of his head. Likes his balls in your mouth; the way you drool and roll them around. Likes, maybe too much, your eyes on his eyes as you press your nose to his perineum and swipe over the hot puckered pink skin below. His hands clutch at your hair and drag you up, push you back down onto him. Oh, he’s desperate now. Look how he guides you, gently, but in control. Look how he presses his toes into your ribs and instructs you to bob up and down with spine-sparking tugs on your hair. Look how he holds you there, with your lips stretched out around him, and your throat swallowing, swallowing, swallowing, so tightly, against him.

The entire neighbourhood must hear his panting, his keening, his pretty, filthy pleading.

He’s close. You can feel how his cock grows harder between your lips, the vein pulsating, the pressure building in the tight knots of his thighs. His hips buck in tiny thrusts and you focus your mouth on his crown, sucking, sucking, while your hand pulls at him below. 

The sound he makes when he spills inside your mouth, when he bursts hot and thick across your tongue, when he throbs and throbs and is lost utterly to pleasure, that sound is just for you. So are the ones he makes when he draws you up his body, his hands cupping your cheeks. The satisfied hums he makes as he tastes himself on your tongue are for you and you alone. He wraps himself around you and gives you his mouth and his breathless smiles and grateful praise. Gives you his tiny whimpering moans when your hard cock rubs against his spent one. His whispered gentling words as he rolls you onto your back, they’re just for your ears. The quiet shushing movements of his hands over your shoulders and down your sides. The sound your heart makes in your ears when he straddles your thighs and rises up above you, whiskey-gold and glowing, they’re all for you.

Your body is a muted roar in the background as you gaze up at him.

“It’s my turn,” he says, hands fit to your waist, thumbs moving in slow arcs on your stomach. “I get to solve your puzzle now.”

“John,” you say, a bare exhale, wracked by feeling. It cracks through you, fault lines you didn’t know were there, splitting, opening you up for him. You wonder if he can see it in your eyes. You wonder if you should hide it, if you even could.

“Hey,” he says, eyes softening, seeing _something_. Falling down onto elbows that bracket your head so that he can brush your noses together. “I’m going to take care of you, hmm?” he murmurs, his breath warm on your lips. You shift against the mattress, wanting and wanting and not wanting to want. “I told you, I want to make you feel good. I told you I’m going to make you feel so bloody good. Sherlock, my gorgeous, gorgeous boy, I’ve got you, yeah?”

And below him, held safe within the boundaries of his arms, his words, his body, you break apart into a hundred-thousand pieces. 


	10. Chapter 10

You shut your eyes against him.

Him with the dark dazzle of his blue eyes and his buttery skin and his carefully concealed fury. Him with his secret slanted smile and soft knowing touches. His sweet, coaxing kisses. His earnest exclamations over your freckles.You lie quiet and tense beneath him as he kisses the ones on your neck.

It doesn’t take him long to notice your unnatural silence and the nervous tremors vibrating through you.

“Sherlock,” he says, sitting back, leaving the cool shape of his mouth evanescing on your throat. “Should I stop?”

“No,” you croak, clutching at his knees with your hands.

He shifts, redistributing his weight across your legs; you can feel him straighten, spine bristling with uncertainty.

“It’s.” You bite down, grind your teeth together.

 _Too much_.

“Tell me what you want.”

It seems an impossible question. Your mouth works fruitlessly, none of your hundred-thousand pieces communicating with one another.

You shake your head, furious with yourself, eyes still screwed tight.

“Ok. All right.” He pauses and in your minds eye you can see the pull of his tongue over his lips. The way he must be staring down at you in concern, the space between his brows notched with worry.

“It doesn’t have to be sex you know,” he goes on, slowly. Picking his way. “We could just…kiss. We could go to bed. Watch telly? Or, or,” grasping at straws, “or tea?”

“Yes,” you say, absolutely miserable.

“Yes to tea, or? Yes to—?”

You groan, far past the point of such practical, rational thought. But. It will buy you time, it will buy you some time to pull yourself together, stitch things up, stop the dissembling. “Yes. Tea.” You cover your face with your hands.

“Good, good. Um. Right.”

You hear him moving about; the shush of clothing being pulled on. He stops on his way out the door to press a kiss to your hairline just above the tips of your fingers and then he’s gone.

You breathe.

You breathe.

You are thirty-three and a grown-up and this is quite pathetic. One ordinary man cannot come into your life for one ordinary Thursday night and upend things so neatly.

Just outside your door he’s opening and closing cupboards; the fridge; you hear the ring of a mixing bowl set down on the tiled counter, echoing shrilly.

What is he doing? A fear of him discovering what’s in your freezer gets you moving.

You scrub your hands over your face and fetch your robe, tie it loosely about your waist while you rummage through your trousers for your cigarettes. You ignore the trembling in your fingers as you light one, drawing the smoke deep into your lungs. You hold it there until your eyes water and then you let it out in one long lacy stream. You need a drink. You stride past him, he’s a blur of white and gold in your periphery as you make your way to your sideboard, pouring out a finger of whiskey. Another. A third.

You turn, lean back against the windowsill and face him.

He’s dressed in your shirt, you realise dumbly.

He’s in your white button-down standing at the kitchen counter, plugging in the kettle. It’s comically too big on him, the white hem just brushes the bottom of his thighs and the too-long sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. His feet are bare, one foot tipped up onto toes, the pink curve of his heel resting against the opposite ankle. His hair is adorably mussed, from your fingers, from your bed, from the cowlicks sticking up at the crown of his head. He spoons sugar into one of your mismatched tea cups and draws his fingertips through the condensation on the side of the milk bottle absently. There are eggs, brown and speckled, that he sets carefully inside the bowl.

Whiskey tumbler in one hand, cigarette in the other, your robe hanging off one shoulder, about to come untied, you stare.

Him before you.

Standing at your kitchen counter, back to you. In your shirt.

“Where’d you keep your pans?” he asks, chin resting on his shoulder, looking at you. “I thought I’d make eggs. I’m starving.”

Looking at you with his blue blue eyes and his indefatigable bloody calm, letting you and letting you and letting you be your strange and true self. You gulping air into your lungs like you’re drowning off the coast of him and him with his safe harbour arranging the tea things calmly just over your listing bow.

One eyebrow is raised at you and you wanted to taste whiskey on his tongue didn’t you? You did, so you shove off and capsize toward him. On your way you pull out a pan and set it down on the hob beside him with an unholy clatter. His scent rises up to meet you and you reel. Is this how sailors felt when they got that first whiff of land, still surrounded on all sides by the endless sea? Home like a blade between your ribs? You burrow your nose into his neck and wrap your arms around him from behind. He sighs contentedly and leans into you, tilting his head just so.

You stick your scotch-soaked tongue in his mouth, a ship wrecked on the way he opens to you. The way he lets you plaster yourself to him, rubbing your still-hard cock against him, letting you make sounds that embarrass you. Lets you want in this way that you don’t want to want, lets you take in this foreign way you don’t know how to take, lets you ask for things, for _any_ thing, lets you and lets you…

And all the while he holds the line, standing there with you draped over and around him, a buttress bracing your need, holding you up, letting you soar.

“You don’t much like giving up control do you?” he whispers, as you madly nuzzle his ear and jaw. The kettle begins to rumble as you nudge the collar askew to taste the skin of his shoulder. “It’s too much, yeah? When I’m the one touching you?” You don’t say anything. It’s not precise, it’s not exact, but you can see how he might have come to this conclusion from your actions. It’s just on the verge of being right, so you don’t correct him. The rest is redacted anyway, it doesn’t _matter_. “It’s ok,” he says, speaking into your silence. “I mean, it’s ok, it’s all fine. Whatever you want. It’s. Fine. _Sherlock_.” Your teeth sunk into the lobe of his ear.

He’s only bothered to do up one button and it ducks out of it’s hole easily enough for you to slip the shirt off his shoulders.

It lands in a puddle around his bent elbows as you trace your lips across his shoulders and into the hair that grows in a V at the nape of his neck.

He laughs, giggling again, oh delightful sound, and grips the counter in front of him. “I was going to make you eggs.”

“And who’s stopping you?” you say, rough and coy, feeling better, feeling steadier, already. Maybe John was closer to right than you thought. Was it really as simple as that? For you to be the one driving the boat, tending the rudder? Controlling how far out you got? There’s no denying how much surer you feel as you kiss your way down his back, as you fall to your knees on the lino with its pale pink roses and the washed out jade of its leaves, kneeling at his feet. John drops his arms to his sides and the shirt flutters down to crease around his ankles.

He lets you be.

Lets you make yourself safe.

Lets you palm his shoulder blades and brush the sweat gathering in the small of his back with your lips. Down over his pale round cheeks. His firm, fuzzy thighs.

Lets you dull your panic in the act of giving him pleasure.

Lets you pull him apart.

Lets you lean in and give him your tongue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you Violet <3


	11. Chapter 11

His skin under your white hands: peach, citron, rose.

You split the tender flesh of him, lick over the stone buried inside, dark, earthy, ribbed, and hard. Bitter on your tongue and resistant. He tenses and knots up against you, breathing noisily, shivering and shivering. Knuckles white on the counters edge. Toes gripping the floor.

You lick long slick stripes over him. Nose buried in the sweaty crease of his body.

Feet shifting apart, squueeeeaaakkkkking on the lino. Spreading himself, oh, opening himself, you dig your fingers into the softness of his arse cheeks and pry him wider.

“Oh, oh,” he pants, bowing, flowing down onto your mouth as you eat at the ripe centre of him. Flattening your tongue over his pursed entrance, getting him soaked and dripping all down the inside of his trembling thighs. His head hung between his shoulders, his cock swinging heavy between his legs. You reach under and pull the thick shaft down, running your fist up and down it. “Oh, oh,” gasping and shivering, shivering, shivering.

His skin bitten red, marks nibbled beneath the swell of his cheeks. His skin a plush decadence between your teeth. He blushes to apricot all the way up his spine to his nape.

He can’t see you. Can’t look into you with those eyes, can’t shatter you further. You’re safe and he’s the one making embarrassing sounds now, listen to him, he’s practically sobbing, pushing himself back, just shoving himself back against you as you make a sloppy mess of him, as you lick him so good, so good he’s reduced to whining. Listen, listen, can they hear him? Can all those Thursday people out in the ordinary world hear him keening for your tongue? Can the buzzing yearning crickets and the green cut grass and the river wind rushing through the trees and the many petaled folds of the roses wet with dew three floors down hear the harsh way he breathes for it, the way he shivers and shivers for it, the way he spreads his legs wider, wider, pressing back, wanting more, his cock so hot and big in your hand as you tug at it, as you lick him, lick him, as you knead that tight muscle, as you worry at it, flicker at it, lap at it, as it softens, softens like wax under a flame, softens for you, softens softens supples and lets you, lets you, lets you tuck right in.

“Oh, God,” ground out, like glass beneath a heel and he’s thrusting now. Fucking himself on your tongue and pushing his huge pulsing cock into your fist and if you’re not careful he’ll come all over your cupboards, come all over the floor.

You wrap your hand around him and pull off.

“Nngg. No.” He shakes his head in emphatic protest. “No. No. No.”

“Eggs,” you say.

And he laughs, raw and husky. Shakes his head. Sways his arse back. Asking.

You wait.

“Oh, no. No. Oh, Christ, you’re serious.”

You wait.

Egg shells snapped on the lip of a mixing bowl and the yolks break and run, sunny and lurid, from his shaking hand. The kettle is turned off, the steaming water is poured. You nuzzle into the divot in the small of his back and rest your forehead against him, holding his storm thrashed heart beat in the circle of your hand, holding him fast.

The windows in the cathedral will be constructed from chips of glass glazed all the shifting colours of his eyes. You’ll stand in it and be stained cerulean, aqua, celeste, cyan, iris, violet, viridian, turquoise, teal, azure, tiffany, midnight. You kneeling on a sandstone floor, flags of ochre coloured rock the exact shade of his skin, the exact colour of a beach in the south of France that you once traipsed across with your grandmother’s hand in yours and the blue blue ocean and the blue blue sky stretching for fathoms before and above you.

Whisk on the inside of the metal bowl, like rain scraping a tin roof. Tapping. Ringing. Grating. It breaks up your reverie, grounds you here.

Him on the altar. Here. There.

You return to the task at hand.

You take his hips and bring him back towards you, you bury your face in him, bury your tongue in him. Let the sea close up over you, burying you in all that clear blue light.

You, buoyant; safely moored.


	12. Chapter 12

By some miracle, the eggs don’t burn.

You make it as far as the floor to the right of the hob, him sat with his back up against the cupboards, you in his lap, a plate of dry, crumbly eggs and toast with blackened streaks and raked with haphazard swipes of butter shared between you. You pass the teacup back and forth. His mouth is hot and sugar sweet when you lick in, chasing the tannic, creamy taste; crumbs caught in the whiskers around his lips clinging to you when you pull away.

The breeze has died and you’re both sweating in the gauzy air, fingers sticking, tacky, skin like a salt lick leaving your tongue parched and thick in your mouth. The clock on your mantle strikes midnight.

Outside, the world has gone quiet. Except for the odd siren, the occasional blare of a car horn, the night is hushed. There is only the soft sound of your mouths touching, your hearts, in your ears, thumping.

He kisses you deeper, deeper, his tongue in your mouth, exploring, and you get hard. Again. Can’t help it. All your blood rushing south to pound in your thighs, to knot in your navel. You slide your knees forward and he’s hard too. You didn’t let him come, you didn’t. It’s a miracle really, you with your tongue shoved as deep as it would go and him paring slivers of butter off into the pan making desperate sounds above you.

“I could,” he whispers, whispering as you clutch at him, riding the long thick line of him, grinding down, pressing close, close, “I could,” panting, “just,” so softly moaning, “touch you, _oh_ ,” arms winding inside, around you, to draw you even nearer, “Sherlock,” your name in his mouth, like something precious, “Sherlock, I could just,” words lost as you kiss him, blood chasing frantically through your veins, bright and hot, about to burst, “touch you where, where you touched me,” kissing, kissing; mouth like a bruise and only wanting more, “exactly where you touched me,” your hips rocking, slick hard skin rubbing rubbing gliding throbbing, “so that,” aching all over with his breath hot on your mouth and his skin hot on your skin, “you would know what to expect and you wouldn’t,” close, close, “be,” so bloody close, “overwhelmed.”

Blinking at him.

Blinking at him.

Roses beneath your knees, roses in his cheeks and beneath your hands. Thorns all over, pricking, pricking. _That_ feeling inside you, a bud, furled tight. Breathing the green grass air with the green leaves below you. And the blue of him, the thousand thousand shades of blue, washing you in light.

He licks his lips. Roses, pink, pink. Prick. Prickling up. Your skin under his hands. “I’ve spent the last week with people who talked of nothing but their last moments.” Dark lashes lowered against his cheeks. “They didn’t know it was their last night, last morning, last kiss, last word and they—. We’re soldiers, yeah? But you can’t know. You can’t _really_ know. And.” Swallowing. “I want…”

“John.”

He shakes his head. Voice scraping. “I want to do whatever you like.”

“John.”

Brows furrowed. “I want to make you feel good.”

“I know. John—”

“Will you let me? Will you just, just lay down with me? Just be with me. Just show me how. Please. I don’t care if we, if it’s not what you want, I don’t care if we don’t. I—”

“Yes. John. Of course. Yes.”

You lay yourselves down in your bed, side by side, facing each other, your legs fit together down below. Thorn pricked skin bare to the heavy air. The white curtains against the sash still, unrifled, limp. The crickets on the green, still making music from their longing. A symphony of hunger and need and desire. It echoes beneath your skin, thrums there in your heart, a perfect cacophonous match.

“Show me,” he says softly, letting you, still letting you, steer. “Show me how to touch you.”

And what use is pretence here? So you draw two of his fingers into your mouth, get them wet, and then slip them between your legs.

“Fuck,” he gasps, as he pets at you, as he pets and pets over the velvety heat of you. “Oh, God, Sherlock, we need, lube, we need, oh, fucking he—“ Bitten off as you shove down, the hot clutch of your body swallowing the tips whole. Lip bitten to rouge as you rock your hips, bearing down. Singed, you shiver. You shiver and shiver just like he did, in the kitchen, begging for your tongue. Him, rolling you beneath him with his fingers tucked just inside you, so close to where _that_ feeling is just beginning to unfurl, so close to where, if he could just, could just reach it, you would blossom completely, all protections gone. It’s terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. “Sherlock. Lube. Where?”

Your hand outstretched. Gesturing. Breath like a coal in your throat. “Drawer.”

Somehow, how, you don’t know, because you’ve shut your eyes, haven’t you, you coward, somehow he finds it without having to leave you.

Without having to leave you empty.

But.

For a moment, while he applies the lube, just a moment, seconds really, and oh, listen how you whine.

Can they hear you?

Two slick fingers as they slide inside you, the ridiculous wet squelch of it, the sound of your heels grappling on the sheets, your hands shunting restless over his skin?

Do they hear him when he:

“Christ,” murmured as he watches where he’s slowly pumping in and out of you. At where you are stretched out around his knuckles. At where you are splayed open for him, knees spread wide on the dark grey sheets. He shifts, lying down beside you, pressed close, and you turn into him, wrap a leg over his hip, and tremble as he pushes deeper. Deeper. Like he kisses you. Deeply. His tongue licking into your mouth as he strokes inside you. Close. So close. Cocks slotted into place, making a mess of your bellies between you.

“Show me,” he says. “Show me how.” So you draw his mouth to your ear and he rakes his teeth over the edge, sending sizzling shocks of euphoria skating down your spine, and then, brilliant man, sucks the lobe between his lips. The sandpaper rasp of his breath overwhelms you.

“Tell me,” you gasp, clutching at his head, at his fingers, his hip.

His voice ground down into you, rough, “I knew the moment I saw you.” They can hear you moan, those Thursday people, they must, they must be able to hear you all these stories up in the quiet unbroken night, all these small noises you are making as he whispers in your ear. “I had to have you. Had to touch you. Had to kiss you.” Tongue curling around and in. Fingers curling up and in. “Knew you were magnificent. Unlike anyone I’d ever seen. I had to, oh, Sherlock.”

His thumb pressed down, fingers curved up, that spot pinched between them, and the heat sluices through you. Splintering rays of razor edged light. That light that was building between you before, deepens now from dawn to dusk, to blood orange and pomegranate, to red wine and currants, to crushed blackberries and aubergine.

His silky slick cock against yours, beside yours, hips jerking, fucking into each other’s hot sweaty skin. One arm tucked beneath your neck, his hand in your hair as you ride him. As you ride his fingers and his cock with his tongue thrust in your ear. His breath in your ear. His words in your ear. Telling you you’re the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Telling you how if he could just find a way to be with you, then tomorrow he would be able to… 

What sound do they hear when you come?

What sound do they hear when he finally touches that fisted bud? When the thorns are made useless and the casing is sundered and the naked petals unfold?

What sound does the rose make when it finally, finally blooms?


	13. Chapter 13

_sn—ick_

_rickrickrickrickrickrickrick_

The sound scratches against the inside of your head. You draw your brows together, unable to place it.

_sn—ick_

_rickrickrickrickrickrickrick_

You feel him shift beside you on the bed, rolling you slightly towards him.“Wha’re you do-ing?” you mumble, smushing your face down into the pillow.

“You’re lovely.” You can tell, by the way his voice is husky, that he’s smiling.

You peel one eye open and squint up at the smeared blur of him hovering above you.

_sn—ick_

_rickrickrickrickrickrick_

The man, damn him, is, inexplicably, holding a disposable camera.

“They passed them out yesterday at the—.” His throat working noisily in the quiet of the room. His eyes flick up to yours, a glassy sheen laid over the blue that he blinks quickly away. “I’ve been attending funerals. I should have said. That’s why I’m home.” You nod. You had already guessed, but there’s no need to explain how. He pauses, nodding, taking your easy acceptance as kindness perhaps, and then clears his throat. “The, um, the widow said that her and her husband used to carry them around with them while he was deployed. They’d have the photos developed and then send them to each other so that they felt like they could share their days with each other. A bit soppy maybe, but I thought—”

“Not soppy,” you say as he comes into focus. “It was a way for them to feel connected.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking faintly surprised that you grasped that. Frankly, you’re a little surprised too. Sentiment, like emotion, isn’t really your area either, but you can see how you would want to be connected to him, how you would want to know what he saw, who he spent his time with, to feel as if you could picture his world when he talked about it, so far from your own.

He’s grinning softly down at you, grateful that you understood, sitting starkers beside you, peering at you through the tiny window. His hair is sticking up all over and there’s a mole you didn’t notice the night before, inked on the inside of his bicep. He’s unbearably handsome and tawny as a river rock bathed in the translucent light of early morning streaming in through the open window behind you. By some chance that beggars belief, he’s in _your_ bed and he’s taking photos of you and he thinks you’re lovely of all confounding things, and it all makes your heart thud a bit wildly in your chest.

_sn—ick_

_rickrickrickrickrick_

You pull the pillow over your head.

You hear, muffled through down and cotton, the sound of his chuckle as he jostles down beside you. Snakes his arm around you and pulls you snug against him. You peek out and there he is, nudging his happy mouth down to yours.

Beneath the pillow, together, you kiss.

There in the feather soft darkness with the birds out the window, singing crystal notes out into the rising August heat, your tongues softly meet. A block away the tourists will have already started lining up to get into the museum and tyres on the hot pavement make a sibilant hissing sound from the open windows down the hall.

You feel melted. Liquid, you mold yourself against him. The top sheet whispers down your calves as his knee fits itself between your legs. He buries his face in your neck and holds you. You know exactly what he’s going to say before he says it.

“I have to go.”

He holds you and you steadfastly ignore the hollowed out ache in your diaphragm.

“Take a shower with me?”

Blue blue blue eyes.

You both come once more. Him leant back against you, his cock in your hand, yours nestled between his arsecheeks. You kiss all the way through, one hand wrapped gently around his throat, palm just resting against the bob of his Adam’s apple, thumb pressed to the humming thrum of his pulse.

You’ll remember the clear water falling down. You’ll remember the cool blue tile all around you. You’ll remember his head tipped back, body wet and glossy and warm against you, lips slick, tongue slick, cock slick: yours.

He shaves while you brush your teeth and you’ll remember how he smells like your shaving foam when you lean down to kiss his neck as you wrap yourself up in your dressing gown after. You make the coffee while he dresses. You’ll remember how his mouth tastes like bitter dark caramel when he kisses you, how his tongue slides hot against yours, how his hand finds your waist and rests there, holding you. You stand at the counter, close together, sipping. Him buttoned back into his uniform. Impeccable. Contained. Removed. You can feel the ties that the night knit unraveling. You can feel him gathering himself behind his walls, preparing for the day ahead.

You ache. You ache and you ache. But you don’t let on. You let him make himself safe.

You walk him to the door.

“If I. If.” He struggles. Jaw clenched. Looking down. Hands turning his beret in his hands. Around and around. You stand in front of him, wrapped in blue silk. Your mouth tastes like ash and you long for a cigarette. For something to do with your hands. For something, anything, to cut the pain in your chest. Sweat springs up, sticks the silk to you. The heat of the day already pressing like embers into your cheeks. The smell of your body spiking the air with salt.

“If I come back.” Tongue darting out to wet his lips. Lashes dark against the bright glister of his eyes. “I’ll look you up, yeah?”

“When,” you correct, voice scratchy, barely there.

“What?”

“ _When_ you come back.” 

He nods. Nods and nods. Nods like he doesn’t believe you, but he’ll play along. For you.

Letting you.

Letting you dream a dream where he survives.

You can’t bear it. He can’t either. His hand wrapped around the back of his neck, fingertips dug into the straining muscle. All of him pulled tight, like a chord.

“Yeah. When I come back. Ok. I’ve got to…”

How are you supposed to just let him?

The kiss is a desperate, crushing thing. A hard and begging thing. A tender and fierce and aching aching thing. If this is it. If this is the last moment.

“What would they have done differently?” you ask, breathless, foreheads pressed together, your hands fisted in his jacket, the wool abrading your knuckles.

“Who?”

“The widows. The widowers. The ones that were left. Did they say? If they had known it was their last—“

Harsh breath exhaled. “I don’t—I didn’t—“

You think to yourself: they would have done it exactly the same. Made sure they felt loved. Made sure they felt cherished. Made sure they knew that their memory was safe with them. Your thoughts race and race. This extraordinary man. Alone in London. No family to visit on his last night in town. _This man_. Heading out into the unthinkable with no one to cherish him. No one to keep the memory of him. No one to make him feel loved.

When he is. He is all of those things.

But.

You, who has only known him for one single night, cannot possibly say these things to him. They’re ludicrous even if you know they are true. So you say the only thing you can say.

“Send them to me.”

“What?”

“Send them to me. The pictures.” You ramble your address off before you can stop yourself. “It’s 42d Montague Street. Sherlock Holmes. Bloomsbury.”

“Sherlock—“

“WC1B.”

“Sherlock.”

“Please.” You nuzzle him. You kiss him until he whispers, “Yes, yes, all right, all right,” against your lips.

As the door shuts behind him, you’ll take that feeling of safety he gives you and wrap it around you. That feeling you’ve never felt with another person since your grandmother who you lost so many years before. You feel it mantle you, settle over you. You let it infuse the space you’re building out of him, like those churches in France that she took you to: peaceful, sacred, holy. And as you watch him walk down the street, crisp navy blue against the ivory pavement with the honeysuckle light shining in his hair, your heart burning a hole through your throat, you know you’ll never—never—be able to forget him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In response to some comments I'm getting, no this isn't the last chapter. There will be two more. Thank you for your support lovely readers. It's the nicest thing to know you want to see more <3 <3


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The unbelievably talented Bluebellofbakerstreet was kind enough to lend her artwork to this chapter. I am so incredibly grateful for her art and time. They made this chapter come to life. Thank you Bluebell!!!!

You try.

You try your damnedest to forget him.

Especially when the first month passes.

And then the second.

You shut the doors on the cathedral.

You get on with the business of living.

You decide you don’t want your brother’s money anymore. Your last act is to use his cash to buy a set of tailored suits. A fine coat. Shoes. You schedule your thesis defence and don’t show up. Instead you have it printed and bound in leather and then mail it to him with fuck off written across the dedication page.You put an ad in the Times offering private detective services. You solve your first case and with the proceeds you have your violin restrung. You ignore the CCTV cameras as they follow you on the streets.

You quit smoking.

You start a blog.

You are sober sober sober and you are _trying_.

You study ash and blood spatter and maps and psychology journals and traffic patterns and poisons and physics. You pick half the locks within the bounds of Saint Pancras and Regent’s Park just to see if you can.

The DI feeds you up, watches you, actually listens to you, even protects you. ChineseNandosThaiShwarmaFishNChipsPretPretPret. You haunt the Yard.

You pester the girl in the morgue until she becomes almost, almost, a friend.

A British woman named Martha Hudson emails you from Florida. You stay a week in Miami and sort her husband for her. When she hugs you she’s wearing your grandmother’s perfume. You can picture the beautiful honey-gold bottle sitting on her dressing table. The way her neck had arched as she dabbed it behind her ears. Her long elegant hands. Her thundercloud of blue-black hair shot through with streaks of silver. The dry champagne sweetness of an armful of carnations and violets and irises rises up to meet your nose and you close your eyes for a moment and let it transport you.

You’ve read that physicists really only understand 5% of what the universe is made up of. How then do these people who practically scream the word _Home_ in your ear keep showing up? These people offering refuge when all you had ever known before was cruelty? It defies all probability. This woman here holding you and in London your friends who keep you in livers and crime and a man with gentle hands and blue blue eyes telling you, showing you, otherwise.

You kiss her papery cheek with the doors of the cathedral cracked open and you turn away, nudge it shut, promising to see her in London.

You return and solve more cases. Write more blog posts. You quit smoking again.

You _try_.

But there are moments when the memory of him is so sudden and so sharp it leaves you breathless. The tart burst of plum wine on your tongue at a Japanese restaurant in Pimlico. Licking the salt from your fingers after a packet of crisps. Being bathed in the cool lapis light of an autumn sky. The roses beneath your bare feet when you pour your coffee each day. The feel of your shirt buttons whispering through their holes. The spectre of him making the top of your head prick prick prick, the pleasure you took in him like a hot gush of blood flooding down your body. 

As September turns into October the crickets quiet and the heat is replaced with a burn of a different sort: the icy sear of the wind and the rain.

The rain.

The rain.

At night you touch yourself and don’t think of him.

You buy a scarf of softest wool the exact colour of his eyes and don’t think of him.

You run your fingers over amber whisky bottles inside Waitrose and _don’t don’t don’t_ think _._

And then.

One perfectly ordinary Tuesday in early October.

There he is.

Sitting barefoot and criss-cross on a tattered rug smiling, drinking tea.

Your heart.

Your heart.

Your heart punching a path straight through your ribs.

This scrawled on the back in neat, slanted print (left-handed now tattooed on your brain):

 _Sorry if this took a long time to get to you. I forget sometimes about the bloody MoD censors. I’m not sure how many photos will actually make it through, but I’m hoping this one is innocuous enough. I won’t mention names or places. Tea with a friend in his home. ~~I got to meet~~_ ~~_his wife and three kids._ ~~ _We ate noqul, these sugar and cardamom coated almonds, and lots of biscuits._

There are five in all.

You run out and buy a camera from the shop around the corner. Within two days you have them printed and sent. Only one of you in the pile of London landmarks. Taken by an Australian tourist at Westminster, with Ben looming in the background.

_I thought you might be homesick_ , you write, your cheeks hot with blood.

 _God, what I wouldn’t give to feel the rain right now_ , he says on the back of a photo of the sky at sunset, looking like it was doused in petrol and set on fire.

Ten make it through in the next packet. Fifteen. Three. Nine. Eleven. His short descriptions occasionally redacted with thick black stripes mirroring the redacted strips of impossible confessions buried deep inside your chest. You get tiny glimpses of his life. It’s barely, just barely, enough.

You want to write: do you remember? Do you remember the first time our eyes met? Do you remember that shocking electric pulse? Do you remember the heart hunger hand hunger mouth hunger body hunger wracking you before we touched? Do you remember what it felt like when I was inside you, when you were inside me? Do you remember your mouth on my mouth on my skin on yours?

On the back of one of him looking at someone off camera, relaxed, with his hands in his pockets, struck golden by the sun, and the brown mountains in the distance: _There are so many things I wish I could say to you. ~~(Fuck you MoD)~~ Just know that the photos I took of you that morning in your bed go with me wherever I go. Send me another of you, when you have a moment, please?_

__

You can tell it pleases Molly, your almost morgue friend, when you ask her to take your picture in the lab. You tell her it’s for an experiment, something to do with a case.

You wear your best suit. The Prada shirt the colour of mulberries striking against your pale skin, your dark hair; it tinges your steel-blue eyes the barest bit periwinkle at the edges of your irises.

On the back: _I suppose it’s only fair you send me one of you in bed now, yes?_

The next month: his eyes creased closed in smile, white sheets drawn up just beneath his nipples, two dark spots in the honey of his skin, his hair untidy, one arm hooked over his head. You can remember with a jolt that lashes you down to your toes how he tasted there, beneath his arm. And the flavours of his laughter and his smiling mouth and his musky, salty skin. His body sleepy and warm and tangled up with yours. You remember how he gasped and shivered, how he pleaded, how he trembled and trembled. You cup it in your hand and force yourself to breathe.

It goes on for months this way. A conversation taking place in fragments and across time and continents. Tiny intimacies kept in your breast pocket. Him there, close to your heart.

And then, one gray morning in March a postcard arrives. Strange handwriting, but signed with John’s name. Spanish postage. Spanish coast. Costa del Sol in block lettering. The sea. Palm trees. A sandy strip of beach. The name of a hotel is scribbled at the bottom.

_My friend Bill just got back from here. I had him post this while he was there so that the censor wouldn’t toss it. I’ll be on leave for a week at the end of next month. I know you were busy with that case, but if you have a free day, pop down and see me, yeah?_

Your heart.

Your bursting beating booming heart.

Yeah.

Yes.

Of course, yes.

YES!

You flip open your laptop and start looking up tickets.


	15. Chapter 15

You’re thirty-three when you meet him for the first time.

Thirty-four when a bullet almost takes him away.

Thirty-five when you wait inside a bar in the salt crusted breeze wafting off the Mediterranean just outside the open window to your left.

It’s a bar not unlike the one you first met in, candles flickering on tables, leather gleaming, spirits winking. You perch on the edge of a bar stool in a deep blue velvet suit and take a sip of John’s whiskey neat which he abandoned only moments before. You swallow, tasting smoke and charcoal and salt and something antiseptic, like cherry drops or iodine on the back of your tongue. You set it aside and watch him as he leans in close to his friend Bill (Belinda) Murray who he served with in Afghanistan, his hand on her shoulder, listening intently over the two men playing Spanish guitars in the corner. Her face, round, British but with obvious Italian roots, with olive skin and long black hair, is animated as she talks, and your John, well, he listens as if it is the only thing he cares about in all the world.

You imagine what they must be saying to each other. A long time has passed since John was discharged from the army after the injury he sustained during a fire fight in April of last year. It seems pure serendipity to find Bill here, vacationing with her family while on leave from her third tour of duty as a combat surgeon in the RAMC. She was John’s closest friend overseas and you know that they haven’t spoken since John was carried off in a chopper towards Helmand all those months ago. They had embraced that afternoon on the beach, her running towards him, shouting his name, brown ankles slick with seafoam, sugar white sand glinting on her calves, body wrapped in a sage green sarong.You had watched John’s face pinch in such a look of pained pleasure as he held her that you had instinctively stepped back, reluctant to intrude, letting John beckon you forward when he was ready. 

What will he tell her?

About the months he spent hobbling around London with his cane and his gun tucked like a promise in the bottom drawer of his desk?

Will he tell her how he avoided you, never answering your letters, your calls? How he told you to forget about him? Of the nightmares and the tremor and the phantom pain in his leg and the way he felt himself useless, untethered?

Or about that day in Bart’s with Stamford your unwitting ally, giving you one last chance. And over the months that followed, you wooing him with thrill and danger and trust and reminding him reminding him reminding him who he was? Will he tell her about the morning in July when he came down the stairs at Baker Street and kissed you, so so softly, hello?

How do you explain to someone how the soul, the heart, the body mends, one painful stitch at a time?

Does he notice? you wonder as Bill joins you for post-dinner cocktails, her and John laughing and telling war stories. Does he see the pile of medical journals on his nightstand and the Google searches for locums hiring GPs and the twice weekly date at the racquetball club with Stamford? Does he see the way he sleeps through more nights than not?The way his scar has faded from a blast sight to a web of spider silk?

It’s a miracle happening in increments. So gradual you almost miss it until one day you’re on the other side of it, looking back and marvelling at how far you’ve come.

“You were quiet tonight,” John remarks when you’re back in your hotel room. He sets the keycard down on the dresser and leans against it, facing you. You sit on the bed, toe off your shoes, and shrug. You reach for him.

John’s mouth tugs up a little, his eyes on yours.

“What’d you think of old Bill?”

His thighs are warm as they settle across your lap, his weight sinking down into you, arms looped around your neck. He smells so good, so familiar, it makes your throat ache; you bury your face in him.

“What? No observations?” He prompts a minute later, teasing. “No deductions? Go on, then, I know you want to.”

It’s not as if you hadn’t gathered any. And it’s not as if seeing how at ease John was with her didn’t make you run hot with jealousy. Any normal day and you would have stripped all the paint from her walls. But then you think again of how happy John was, and how relaxed, and how, in a desert miles and miles away, she had saved his life, and so, “She’s a good friend,” you say into his skin instead.

He sighs, a breath you didn’t know he was holding, having expected something vicious perhaps, or your particular brand of unsparing honesty at the very least, but you’ve managed to surprise him, you can tell, as his hands begin to move again over your back. “She is.”

He has only himself to thank for that small kindness. There has always been a thorn inside you. Of sadness, of difficulty, of shame. Pricking, pricking. Until him you had been nothing but bramble and briar, but among the thicket there is now the odd bloom or two.

“I don’t think we’ve talked about how much I like this new suit,” he says, voice low and rough, brushing his mouth across yours, your stubble scratching at his lips. Blood colours them, the skin pinking up, but he only presses closer; he doesn’t mind your prickly bits, which is the point after all. “You look splendid in it,” he murmurs, hands stroking down your arms, feeling the soft nap of the velvet against his palms.

“John,” you breathe, feeling suffused with heat and want. His tongue slips into your mouth and you moan at the hint of whiskey still burning on his tongue.

“Take it off,” he whispers in your ear a moment later, scrambling off your lap and reaching for his belt. He turns, walking around to the other side of the bed, as you stand, a bit wobbly, on weak knees.

You watch each other undress from across the crisp expanse of the freshly made up bed.

Blue eyes ravishing you, worshipping you, touching you all over with their ardent, hungry light.

Behind him the white muslin curtains stir at the window and the scent of orange blossoms is carried in on the tide of the breeze. Outside the trees sway gently in the courtyard with crimson bougainvillea dripping over its stone walls and beyond them the moonstruck silver caps of the waves crest and break on the shore.

You meet in the centre of the bed, kneeling, naked. The hair on his legs sparks against yours and sends shivers crackling down your spine. He curls his hand into your hair and brings you down to his mouth and the deep wet stroke of his tongue.

“Turn around,” he says, long, kiss-drunk minutes later, and you shiver at the dark husky rasp of his voice, shuffling up the bed to wrap your hands around the headboard. Your skin stings in the raw air, alive with anticipation. You feel him shift at your side, knelt close, silky cock tucked against your hip. You hear the snap of the lube bottle and the way John’s breath is coming fast and hard against your right shoulder blade.

“I need to—“ broken off, breathless. A quiet moan, his teeth on the nape of your neck. His left hand on your belly, steadying. “Christ. I need—“

“Yeah,” you say, hanging you head between your shoulders and bowing your back.

“I want—“

“Yes. Anything. John. Please.”

The sound you make when his fingers slip between your arse cheeks is a deep animal purr. It shudders up and out of you as his slick fingertips rub over you, rumbling in your chest, burring in your throat.

“God, Sherlock.”

You moan again, louder this time. His hand slides up your chest to rest against your sternum, right over the hammer of your heart. You turn your head and meet his mouth. He kisses you through it, the breach and the burn, until he is settled inside you, touching the hectic beat of your blood from the inside.

It doesn’t take long to prepare you. You feel a current arcing between you, a desperate urgency to be joined. Is he thinking, as you are, of how you might have met a year ago if he hadn’t…

How you would have met in the bar downstairs, how your eyes would have met with that same shocking sizzle? There is no way you could have waited, could have sat through drinks and small talk. You would have grabbed his hand and pulled him into the corridor and kissed him up against the mosaic wall. How you would have stumbled down the street, weaving through the crowds on the boulevard out for dinner in the fragrant springtime air, to your hotel room? To this bed?

It had been building between you for months.

You can feel it now, that same frantic energy filling you up to overflowing. You don’t want it soft. You don’t want it gentle. You want him to take you.

“Now, John.” He groans and kisses you and kisses you and then, drawing back, moves to kneel behind you. His knees nudging yours wider as he slicks himself, positions himself, and with a hand on your shoulder, encourages you to sit.

The sound he makes when he enters you is worth the initial pain of your body accommodating the thick girth of his cock. He goes slow, lets you adjust and you bite your lip to keep from gasping. He guides you, up and down, his fingers wetting the rim of you, fondling the swollen edge of where you are stretched out around him, until your body eases, taking him deeper and deeper on each pass.

His breath is wet and warm against your spine as he rests his forehead there for a moment, panting, his hands curled around your hips, holding you still. Your thighs are spread to either side of his, your cock bobbing out in front of you, red and hard and shiny at the tip.

You squirm in his lap, restless, swivelling your hips with him buried so deeply inside you, searching for that spot that promises relief.

John’s hands smooth down the insides of your thighs, urging them even wider, before he thrusts slowly up. Your knuckles go pale around the headboard as the sensation cuts brightly through you. This type of light, the type you create between you when you’re together like this, it’s the vivid hot pulse of the sun at mid-day. It’s the type of light that shines purely white, but which feels red inside you, like being engulfed by flame.

He works you on his cock with abandon. You can tell he’s lost to it just as you are. You lean back, let go your hold, set your knees deeper into the mattress and let him fuck up into you. Let him fill you with the thick throbbing length of his big beautiful cock.

He wraps his hand around you, swiping his thumb over the sensitive head, and you cry out. Pleasure coils deep in your navel, radiating out down your thighs. The heat of his fist and the tight slick clutch of his hand and the way he’s pushing into you, his fat velvety crown hitting your prostate over and over, it takes one stroke, two, and then you’re spilling over his fingers, painting the headboard in your come, the walls ringing with your shout.

You fall forward, into the pillows, senseless to all but the cadence of your blood pounding in your ears, as John thrusts into you from behind. You feel him take your cheeks in his hands and part them so that he can watch himself.

“Oh, God, oh, fuck, Sherlock!” You feel him begin to spurt inside you and you tighten yourself around him, milking him and milking him, until, shaking, he collapses on top of you, spent.

After you clean up he curves himself into your body, tucks all of himself into all of your honeycomb cells, safe, and you lie together in the sweet air listening to the waves crashing on the shore.

“I wouldn’t have made it through this year without you,” John says, quiet, but sure, a little while later.

“You would have,” you say, nuzzling your nose behind his ear, your throat tight tight tight.

John shakes his head, voice hoarse. “I was so alone—”

“You—“

“—and I owe you so much. Thank you for saving my life, Sherlock.”

He’s holding your hand curled right over his heart.

You were thirty-three when you met him for the first time.

On a perfectly ordinary Thursday evening in a perfectly ordinary pub.

You were thirty-three with track marks on your arm and weighing whether or not to give yourself a second chance at living.

And in walked a man who looked at you, just _looked_ at you, and wanted you.

Wanted _you_.

Thorns and all.

You could say then, that he saved your life too.

You’re thirty-five when you whisper, “I love you,” for the first time into the soft silvering vee of hair tapering at the nape of his neck. All of the big sentimental silly cliche feelings you’ve been denying redacted no longer.

He wriggles closer and squeezes your hand. “Mm,” he hums, as if this is old news to him, which, perhaps, it is. You still feel it settle warmly in your chest, the light inside you glowing whiskey gold and radiant when he says, a moment later, “I love you too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As the mother of a transgender child living in the world of Trump it was important to me to participate in Fandom Trumps Hate this year as a small way to fight back against something that terrifies me and has the potential to devastate my family every day. I am so grateful to FTH for giving me this outlet and I'm grateful to [72reasons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/72reasons/pseuds/72reasons) for bidding on me and donating to[Trans Lifeline](https://www.translifeline.org), "a national trans-led organization dedicated to improving the quality of trans lives by responding to the critical needs of our community with direct service, material support, advocacy, and education. Our vision is to fight the epidemic of trans suicide and improve overall life-outcomes of trans people by facilitating justice-oriented, collective community aid."
> 
> I wanted to create a story who's central tenant was the feeling of being seen and loved and accepted and what that does for a person. I see and love and accept my daughter, but not everyone does. And I think that's at the core of the argument against Trump and his ilk: to recognise our base humanity and what connects us, not what divides us, and that everyone has a right to life and health and dignity and safety. To all of my transgender and gender non-conforming readers, my immigrant readers, my refugee readers, my people of color readers, my LGBTQIA+ readers, and to any readers who stand against bigotry and racism and hate and fear: I see you and you are valid and you are worthy and you are loved.
> 
> So thank you FTH for holding up this light in the darkness and letting us fight back in some small way. And thank you to 72 for doing so much good and for giving me a reason to write this fic. Thank you to [Bluebellofbakerstreet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebellofbakerstreet/pseuds/bluebellofbakerstreet) who created such beautiful art for this fic, and to [shelleysprometheus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shelleysprometheus/pseuds/shelleysprometheus) who created a wonderful poem, and to [fiorinda_chancellor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorinda_chancellor/pseuds/fiorinda_chancellor) who created a lovely cover, and to [Lockedinjohnlock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lockedinjohnlock/pseuds/Lockedinjohnlock) who is recording a podfic. Fandom you have my heart forever and ever. This community continues to astound me and save me. Thank you to everyone who read along with me as I wrote. Thank you to everyone reading now. Thank you to everyone who kudos and commented and rec'd and reblogged and shared with others. Thank you, thank you, from the very bottom of my heart, thank you.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover art for ellipsical's "whiskies neat"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14453679) by [fiorinda_chancellor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorinda_chancellor/pseuds/fiorinda_chancellor)
  * [To John](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14478669) by [shelleysprometheus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shelleysprometheus/pseuds/shelleysprometheus)
  * [Snapshots for whiskies neat](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15266718) by [bluebellofbakerstreet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebellofbakerstreet/pseuds/bluebellofbakerstreet)




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